As data requests intensify, Rochester Public Schools lobbies to modify the Minnesota Data Practices Act
Sep. 28—ROCHESTER — On a regular basis, Rochester Public Schools receives data requests from a third party asking for the district's purchasing records: what supplies it's ordered, who it purchased them from, how much it cost and so on.
The company asking for the information isn't connected to the district but wants it regardless. And as a publicly funded entity, the school district has to turn it over.
However, the district is joining a larger effort to curb the way third parties can demand information. The district's school board recently approved a resolution, calling for changes to the Minnesota Data Practices Act, which dictates what data is considered public information.
"People are monetizing this, and it's going to explode," Superintendent Kent Pekel said about the process of requesting the district's data. "It's an unproductive drain on our resources."
The board's action came a week after an initial discussion on the topic during a study session. Now that the district has approved the resolution, it will be submitted to the Minnesota School Boards Association, which lobbies the state Legislature for changes.
In the case of the vendor that regularly requests the district's purchasing history, RPS Chief Administrative Officer John Carlson said he suspects they're using public data to make a profit by selling the data to other companies.
"What I believe they're doing is data mining the results and they're putting it in a database to sell to others," Carlson said. "They're making a financial gain off of information they're getting for relatively no cost, or free from us."
Rochester's resolution calls for several changes, one of which is to prohibit anonymous requests. Another proposed change would allow government organizations to charge a "reasonable fee" when the "requestor clearly intends, based on their business model and business practices, to regularly collect and monetize for commercial purposes."
The Minnesota School Boards Association has been advocating for changes like this for years. An existing resolution of the MSBA calls for the Legislature to allow school districts to "recover all reasonable costs of fulfilling public data requests."
Rochester is just one of the school districts calling for change. Hastings Public Schools is another one that has done so. The district received one request that required it to turn over more than 115,000 emails.
The Minnesota Data Practices Act allows government agencies to recoup some costs associated with fulfilling requests, but school leaders say the law is outdated and often results in substantial costs for the district.
For example, the law currently specifies that government agencies "may not charge for separating public from not-public data." What that means is that districts can rack up costs in the process of redacting documents.
Part of the cost the district incurs through data requests is in the amount of staff time it requires to compile all the information.
However, the district also incurs costs if it has to consult its attorneys about any of the data being requested.
Hastings Public Schools incurred a $6,000 legal fee for work related to a data request.
"It can truly paralyze a district when they come in at that volume," Hastings Superintendent Tammy Champa said.
Even though the district's resolution specifically refers to the commercial use of public data, schools have seen a rise in other kinds of data requests, too.
Champa said schools started seeing an increase in data requests during the pandemic.
"I think it was pretty unheard of until the pandemic," Champa said. "And then when we were in a state of really having opposing opinions about those decisions that were being made, we started receiving data requests at that time. Since then, it's just kind of become an avenue of disruption."
At Owatonna Public Schools, one data request has cost the district nearly $300,000. The request was made in 2021 and has taken nearly three years to compile.
The group requesting the district's data, known as the United Patriots for Accountability, was requesting large swaths of data related to keywords and phrases such as "systemic racism," "ethnic studies" and "critical race theory."
The district's human resources director, Chris Picha, "estimated the request encompassed 750,000 to a million pages of documents," according to the Owatonna People's Press.
Rochester Public Schools has received large, broad requests like that as well. In 2021, it received a 41-page data request from a group called "Equality in Education," which described itself as "a group of concerned parents and taxpayers residing in the Rochester School District."
As in Owatonna's case, the data request submitted to Rochester Public Schools asked for large swaths of data. It referenced every school and specified sources ranging from classroom curriculum to government-funded cell phones.
Unlike Owatonna's case, however, the Rochester request fizzled out. Carlson told the Post Bulletin that after initially informing the group about what the cost would be, they didn't ask the district to actually provide the data.
"We're privileged and pleased to provide authentic insight to the public that wants data requests," Pekel said during the study session on Sept. 17. "But it risks becoming a runaway train."
